Dec 17, 20192 min read

Explainer Video: Creative Brief and Story Boards

People: Ashleigh Salazar and Kaj Harvey

Rather than explain something educational or related to today’s world, we want to do our own spin on an explainer video. We decided to do a video that would almost serve as an orientation video to the afterlife. It was sort of inspired by the “Handbook for the Recently Deceased” in Beetlejuice. Initially, the video was going to straight up be the rules that were explained in the video, but then we decided to make up our own version of the afterlife.

Death is a very much not-fun thing and making a video about it requires a balance of humor and morbidness. The colors would need to be fairly bright, no set color scheme, just the more colors the better. This is sort of inspired by Coco. But even thinking about death, if you were trying to sell someone on it and a version of the afterlife, it needs to be enticing. The look that we envision, is meant to be fun.

Here is the mood board that was developed pre-script stage

The board fits the aim for colors very well. Maybe darker than we are aiming for. But at least for the settings they’ll look a little light this. There won’t be too much animation wise going on within the scenes themselves. Just because visually, I want them to be more detailed, and I don’t want to overcomplicate them animation wise.

For the characters, they need to move, so they need to be simple. We got some inspiration from Crash Course in our initial design for the characters. The bodies needed to be able to be mass produced but easily customized. Kaj then drew up our first character, the narrator and the Grim Reaper himself. The Reaper “would just be some blonde guy”. Peak comedy.

For the video itself we want to cover a lot of ground. We want to touch on different afterlife myths and do a how-to for haunting. We know that the dead would wake up to the grim reaper, who would greet them into the afterlife. Paying homage to Beetlejuice, this will take place in an office sort of environment. Not a dmv, but still something super mundane. Then the person will go on a boat through the different parts of the afterlife. This was inspired by Charon in greek mythology, but for simplicity’s sake we would just have this be the Grim Reaper. We’d do a tour and then as one of the options, a person can choose to haunt people in the afterlife. We threw a lot of things into a planning doc and then narrowed them down as to what myths we are going to focus on as well as the different creatures and rules we can include.

Here are the messy draft notecards. They’re super hard to read but we translated that into a script (which we’ll also post).